Last Thursday, he had a “fireside chat” with his CTO Werner Vogels at “re: Invent” the first big Amazon Web
Services conference. There he presented Amazon as the master of the narrow
margin.

The session contains a sort of “best-of” of Jeff Bezos' insights. Many have
been heard before in one form or the other. Notable was his advice to
entrepreneurs at
the end of the talk:

"Never chase the hot thing (whatever it is).
That's like trying to catch the wave. And you'll never catch it. You need to
position yourself and wait for the wave. The way you do that: You pick
something you're passionate about.

Make sure it is something you're passionate about.
Missionaries build better products. I would take a missionary over a mercenary any
day. Mercenaries wanna flip the company and get rich, missionaries want to
build a great product or service. One of those great paradoxes: it's usually
the missionaries who are going to make more money anyway."

More recent insights from Jeff Bezos are also to be found on Charlie Rose.

In addition, a sort of biography has come out this year called One
Click (“Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com”).

Yesterday, good ole ecomPunk has visited one of those industry events for the sheer fun of it. Reconnecting to people, listening to a couple of presentations (and once more being surprised how boring and uninspiring some people try to get their message across) and eating pretentious-looking food in a pretentious-looking lobby of a fancy hotel. Thematically, it was all about conversion and the question, how the ratio of people visiting an online store and actually ordering stuff can be measured, interpreted and improved. Basically, everybody on stage was singing the song of songs of web controlling, identifying KPIs and relating all these parameters to each other. And this made me wonder. And each time this happens – the most faithful readers might know – I go and pester everybody with this topic to get some clarification. So here goes.

Until Rakuten’s acquisition
of Alpha Direct Services (ADS) last week, Rakuten was not particularly well
known for their ambitions regarding logistics. Pure marketplace providers such
as Rakuten or eBay tend to come into this market space rather slowly.

In a close to 100 page quarterly
report (PDF),
Rakuten elaborates on their (long) road towards “Rakuten Super Logistics”. The
plans have been running since 2006 – deliveries have been running for over 2
years already in Japan:

The concept is for fast deliveries
across different times of the day:

For their Rakuten Mart supermarket, Rakuten
has been using an in-house fleet of vehicles to make grocery deliveries since
July:

In Europe, Rakuten points to
warehouses in England and France:

The logistics company Alpha Direct was founded by
an ex-Bertelsmann/Arvato manager and has been acquired by Rakuten. Rakuten’s
main goal here is to have access to their fulfillment technology, which will be
used in Japan
and elsewhere:

For similar reasons, Amazon took over
Kiva Systems early this year for a price of $775 million.

In the quarterly report (PDF),
Rakuten provides an extensive look into their global logistics strategy which
now counts as one of their three main growth pillars.

Originally posted in
German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Does anyone remember those funny machines on the USS Enterprise that produced every imaginable food and beverage item? From the Earl Grey tea Jean-Luc Picard (hands down the best Star Trek captain there ever was and will be) used to order to almost lethal Klingon cocktails – the replicators could do it all, instantly. When I read about the concept of Same Day Delivery (SDL) I cannot help but think about these 24th century machines.

Yep another blog post about mobile, but this one is sooooo different!! How you ask? Because it’s related to the holiday’s and offers some new facts that might have you rethinking your mobile approach for the upcoming season.

The topic of publishing my buddy Kai has been ranting about lately still makes me wonder. By chance, I came across an interesting phenomenon in the German publication scene called Landlust. The word that roughly translates as “lust for countryside” is the title of a massively successful magazine publication in Germany. In fact, with a circulation of more than 1 million copies every two months it is more widespread than the popular news magazine Der Spiegel. The question is of course: Why do articles about outdoor activities, rustic lifestyle in the countryside, farm animals and simple DIY recipes strike such a chord with so many people?

Of course there are still people who see the world in black and white. Of course there are still politicians who prefer single-party systems for their simplicity, and of course there are still retailers who think that their customers are – pardon the expression – bovine retards. Attention: Those people should really avoid reading the following lines if they don’t want their beliefs to be shaken. The rest are cordially invited to read on and find out more about a key factor in modern e-commerce and how retailers must adapt to it: individualization and personalized advertising. Even if vendors, at the dawn of e-commerce, still weren’t making use of personalized advertising due to lack of technological opportunities, nowadays, operating an online shop without personalized features would be unthinkable.

According to Bitkom, now really is the time, now it’s happening, the breakthrough of the eBook market. German’s most popular reading device is flat and full of electronics and makes it possible to carry around one’s entire book shelf. With about 8 million eBook fans in Germany, both the name and the concept “eBook” have pretty much entered mainstream. Hardware manufacturers are patting their backs. For the entire book industry, the eBook is the symbol of innovation and, because of that, scary and motivating at the same time.

“There won’t be any developer’s paradise this year.” Someone told me, that someone told him, that someone heard that Magento Inc. wasn’t all that excited about the event. But the repeated inquiries of many developers expressed their interest – and then finally it worked out – and with that, approximately 125 developers from roughly 20 countries flew to Ibiza in September of 2012 to get to know each other and share ideas about one common topic: Magento. The event lasted four days and to put it simply: It paid off.